The Distillation

"No, the U.N. leadership is not that open to reform... the U.N. was confiscating copies of the letter calling for the end of the drug war that were being handed out in front of the U.N."

UN Security was apparently ordered to confiscate the letter, and attendees were ordered to hand over their copies upon entering the building. According to a number of participants in the UN Special Session, they were told that the document was not allowed in the building. “As we were walking into the metal detectors right at the entrance, the security were confiscating it from people,” said Natalie Lyla Ginsberg, Policy and Advocacy Manager for Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). Ms. Ginsberg continued, “I went back to ask the security guard why, and he said he got orders from the UN to specifically take the newspapers. He said he was just following orders.”

"Lead researcher Katrin Preller of the University Hospital of Psychiatry Zurich explained that psilocybin has much more specific targets than antidepressants currently on the market."It's too small of a study to draw any strong conclusions from, and the participants were all healthy — they didn't actually suffer from severe social anxiety or depression. But Preller thinks her team has taken a step toward uncovering the mechanism behind a possible treatment. "It seems like by stimulating these two receptors, serotonin 1A and serotonin 2A, psilocybin is acting on brain areas which are responsible for our feeling of social pain — the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. Furthermore, we showed that another neurotransmitter, aspartate, seems to be involved as well," Preller said.

Note: Rachel isn't saying you should go do 'shrooms. Nothing in this post says you should go do 'shrooms. That would be illegal in most places, and probably ill-advised.

“[Our goal was to bring] an unknown topic to most people on campus and the Madison community,” Hanley said. “But it also highlights this really unique research happening on campus.”

Wisconsin Union Directorate Society and Politics Committee hosted the event in collaboration with Nicholas Cozzi, a pharmacologist in the School of Medicine and Public Health. Mazdak Bradberry, an MD, PhD candidate at UW, said the experience was unique in how personal and inwardly focused it was. He said it was not just the drug itself, but the psilocybin accompanied by the counseling, that made the experience so profound. “It’s never the medicine itself, it is the medicine in the context of outstanding guidance that is full of wisdom,” Bradberry said. “So much of this I can’t parse out what was psilocybin or just part of the sessions.”

"Now researchers at the University of B.C. say the drugs may help curb domestic violence committed by men with substance abuse problems".

The UBC Okanagan study, published last week in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, found that 42 per cent of U.S. adult male prisoners who did not take psychedelic drugs after their release were arrested within six years for domestic battery, compared to 27 per cent for those who had taken drugs such as LSD, psilocybin (magic mushrooms) and MDMA (ecstasy). One of the researchers was Zach Walsh, the co-director for UBC Okanagan’s Centre for the Advancement of Psychological Science and Law. He said overall the study speaks to the public health potential of psychedelic drugs in contrast to prevailing attitudes that they are harmful. “As existing treatments for intimate partner violence are insufficient, we need to take new perspectives such as this seriously,” he said. Walsh said with proper dosage and setting, scientists might see “even more profound effects.”

"However, where long-term data is available, it does point to systematic failures in drug policies".

Those risks [to drug use] include punishment by the justice system. However, there too the efficacy of policy is highly questionable. The Brookings Institution published an overview of global counter-narcotics policy in 2008 which compared three different approaches: “the punishment model” employed in the US, which uses incarceration to deter use; “the depenalization model” used in Italy and Spain, which keeps narcotics illegal but doesn’t criminalize personal use within established maximum amounts; and, finally, “the decriminalization model” used in the Netherlands, which allows cannabis sales for personal use. The Brookings analysis was most critical of the US punishment model where incarceration rates have exploded (from fewer than 50,000 people in 1980 to 210,200 in 2015) at huge cost to taxpayers despite the fact that few prisoners have access to any form of drug treatment.

"What they discovered could have major effects on the way we use psychedelics to model and treat psychiatric diseases."

Rather than using LSD itself as a psychological drug — there are certainly other scientists working on that — Carhart-Harris and his team used it as a probe for understanding what they refer to as the “neurobiology of consciousness.” Demonstrating that there’s an actual physical basis to the psychological effects of LSD will, no doubt, boost psychedelics’ cred within the science community, which is still leery of the formerly-fringe field.

"Number Ten: We’re wasting human resources. The large majority are men in their prime. Given the right opportunities, an illegal cannabis grower or a meth dealer could use their knowledge and ingenuity..."

Globally, tens of millions of nonviolent people have ended up in prison for drug offenses. The large majority are men in their prime. The availability of drugs is unaffected; market shares are simply taken over by someone else. Given the right opportunities, an illegal cannabis grower or a meth dealer could use their knowledge and ingenuity to create jobs, pay taxes, and at the same time make many people in their families happy and help countless others— is it really rational that he should linger in prison for years instead?

Led by Psymposia and the Psychedelic Society of Brooklyn(one of at least 50 city-based such societies around the world), they took on the question of why use, support, or call for the legalization of the consciousness-changing drugs by providing their own answers under the format of "Psychedelics Because…"

Earlier this month, scientists examined the brains of people on acid using cutting-edge neuroimaging techniques to show exactly what LSD does in the human brain. And further research on LSD and other psychedelics for therapeutic purposes is ongoing. But the people in the plaza on Tuesday were, for the most part, not scientists and researchers but enthusiasts and psychedelic explorers.

Now the seed had sprouted. Whatever the outcome of UNGASS 2016, ECfES has positioned itself to become a local, grass-roots non-profit which will continue to champion and educate about the positive changes in drug law policy reform which will be laid forth by UNGASS 2016. We will achieve this by assisting the new policy implementation throughout Lane County by providing educational services. In some sense, we are beginning to build what Rick Strassman, MD described in an article some years ago as follows, “psychedelic centers ought to be established, where the full spectrum of scientific, religious, creative, artistic endeavor can be brought to bear on the psychedelic experience; where treatment, growth, heuristic studies can all occur under one roof”.

"[Recalling that] more than eighty percent of the world´s population carries a huge burden of avoidable pain and suffering with little or no access to such medications. "

...harmonization of drug control and Human Rights and development principles. The group membership should represent a balanced selection of experts from Member States and regional organizations, relevant UN agencies, civil society and academia. This state of affairs persists despite the fact that the avoidance of ill health and access to essential medicines is a key objective and obligation of the global drug control regime.

ECfES

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